Fake Your Way to Happiness

By Christopher Shea

Numerous studies have found that people who are natural extroverts tend to be happier than shyer types, but introverts can get a hedonic boost simply by faking it, it appears. And there doesn’t seem to be a downside.

After determining participants’ dispositions through questionnaires, psychologists assigned 117 people to three-person teams and gave them two make-work tasks (ranking the usefulness of tools after a wintertime plane crash, and planning a group day trip). Some participants were assigned to act boldly and assertively; others to be reserved and passive; still others (the control group) received no advice about how to act. Queried later, group members confirmed that people did, in fact, act as they were told to.

Whatever their innate tendencies, the people who acted like extroverts enjoyed the task the most, according self-reports, and they also seemed to be enjoying themselves, according to participants. The researchers had thought that acting against type would cause mental strain, but a subsequent test of concentration and cognition found no cost to introverts pretending to be gregarious knee slappers.

Extroverts forced to act like introverts, however, did perform relatively poorly on the cognitive test, suggesting the role-playing taxed them.

One caveat, the authors said: It is possible that such “counterdispositional behavior” has longer-term cognitive strain that this one study failed to pick up. “If you had to do it for eight hours, I think that might be difficult for anyone,” says John M. Zelenski, of Carleton University. But over short periods, he and his colleagues write, “Acting extroverted could be a useful happiness tool.”

(There’s been lots of talk recently about the benefits of introversion, but even if you’re solidly pro-introvert, this seems like a useful arrow to add to the quiver.)

P.S. This study reminded me of Paul Carr’s “Step Eight” in his Review essay on how he quit drinking without going to A.A.: Do some uninhibited and outrageous things while stone sober. Just as non-drinkers may discover that enjoyable outrageousness does not necessarily require alcohol, so may reserved people discover that enjoyable extraversion doesn’t require the extraversion gene(s).